Patrick Ness · 317 pages
Rating: (35.4K votes)
“Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Feelings don't try to kill you, even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You're responsible for its consequences, you're responsible for treating it. But...you're not responsible for causing it. You're not morally at fault for it. No more than you would be for a tumor.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“The mistake of every young person is to think they're the only ones who see darkness and hardship in the world."
...
"The mistake of every adult, though, is to think darkness and hardship aren't important to young people because we'll grow out of it. Who cares if we will? Life is happening to us now, just like it's happening to you.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I feel like I'm way down this deep, deep hole and I'm looking up and all there is is this little dot of light and I have to shout at the top of my lungs for anyone to hear me and even when I do, I say the wrong thing or they don't really listen or they're just humouring me.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We share out craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What's important is that I know how much you worry about shit. And what's also important is that I know a big part of your worry is that, no matter what group of friends you're in, no matter how long you've known them, you always assume you're the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worth part of being young. So many of your decisions aren't yours; they're made by other people. Sometimes they're made badly by other people. Sometimes they're made by other people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. The bastards.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But I don't care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don't think they're real or important or you think that we'll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that's not really my business. I can't tell you what's real for you. But in return, you can't say what's real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Sometimes you need things rather than just thoughts.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We're just as screwed up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But it's a tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“You always assume you're the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“We're each other's questions, aren't we? The question that never gets an answer.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Now you're sure we are not going to be murdered?" Call Me Steve says, actually looking a bit nervous. "Prom night. Group of diverse teens. Remote cabin…”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“If you're too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What's the point of lying about anything? We could keep being too afraid to say we don't know stuff and then the future will come and eat us anyway and we'll regret not doing all that stuff we wished we did.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.
You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I'm choosing my own story.
Because if you can't do that, you might as well just give up.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“What do you do when your dreams are about to come true?" she asks. "No one ever tells you. They tell you to chase them, but what happens when you actually catch one?"
"You enjoy it. Do your best, try not to be a dick.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Mikey," she says, but not like she's about to say anything more, just like she's identifying me, making a place for me here that's mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I'm grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn't say it felt this sad.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“It'll make you look rugged,' Mel says.
'Because I woke up this morning,' I say, 'and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“I don't do pity kisses," she says. "I don't do pity anything. Pity is patronizing. Pity is an assumption of superiority."
"That sounds like your dad."
"It is my dad, but he's right. He says kindness is better. Kindness is the most important thing of all. Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.
Aren't we?”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“The wind picks up a little more (Terribly sorry, I imagine it saying; apparently, the wind is British, wondering how it got all the way over here)”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Everything's always ending. But everything's always beginning, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
“Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Patrick Ness
Born place: in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, The United States
Born date January 1, 1971
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“There are seven billion people in the world and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents' choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren't the best for you. Maybe you don't fit in where you are now... There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn't get along with any of them?”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
“They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none.”
― Stephen King, quote from Finders Keepers
“He’d finished college with $60,000 in loans, and no job.”
― John Grisham, quote from The Rooster Bar
“This is now, Zipper said, as she picked up a small stone and slid it in her pocket.”
― C.S. Richardson, quote from The End of the Alphabet
“The moral of the story, Son," Pun would say, "is Don't take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels."
Of all lessons, that one I never learned and I hope I never do. My heart daily grows new foliage, always adding people, picking up new heartaches like a wool coat collects cockleburs and beggar's-lice seeds. It gets fuller and fuller as I walk slow as a sloth, carrying all the pain Pun and Frank and so many others tried to walk from. Especially the pain of the lost forest. Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart. We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”
― Janisse Ray, quote from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
March
A Thousand Acres
Into the Wilderness
Infinity
Snow
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